Pattern recognition techniques, including neural networks, statistical pattern recognition, and others may rely on a training phase that is based on a list of labeled examples. It has been difficult to provide such training phase to automatically recognize cursive writing. Doing this would require sampling a database of labeled examples of handwritten words. Producing such a list by human effort is hugely time-consuming and may be infeasible.
However, there may be many uses for such information. For over 70 years microfilm has been an efficient media with which to make archival information available to the general public. The Library of Congress began converting archive records to microfilm in 1928. Cursive OCR (Optical Character Recognition) may extend technology at the California Institute of Technology, microfilm access may be extended to offer worldwide Internet access to archive records.
This may allow the following, and other, applications:
1) Economic History—digitized property assessments and tax rolls may give economic historians one of their first looks at the changes in middle class investment profiles throughout world history. The industrial aristocracy may have invested in plantations and shipping lines, but over time, the yeoman middle class family has typically invested in a home. Centuries of these digitized surveys, therefore, could eventually measure middle class expansion and contraction with the fortunes of war, plague, trade, immigration, and technical innovation.
2) Census Records—Over the centuries, a wealth of handwritten census data has been conserved which connects one generation with another, but they have remained largely inaccessible due to their intractable size and unalphabetized content. Cursive OCR can change all this by beginning the retro-conversion process of handwritten records into electronic data files that can be searched, indexed, and tabulated with the mere touch of a button.
3) Military Records—Digitization of recruitment rosters and State Militia muster rolls would give historians a look at the cross-section of civilian participation in national conflicts. It would also attract heavy use from genealogical researchers interested in veteran ancestries.
4) Government Records—(voter registration lists, immigration lists, signature petitions) Digitization of these historical records would interest primarily political scientists, historians, and demographers, but it would also have current uses in screening voter petitions more efficiently for ballot qualifications.
5) Geneology Records—(marriage, baptismal and death certificates)
Digitization of these records is of high interest to genealogists and family historians. It would also serve, however, as a valuable cross reference to census and property tax surveys, thus helping to validate the precision and accuracy rates of stored information in parallel documents.